Two entrepreneurs-in-residence at rival venture firms teamed up in 2001 to fix a dull, costly problem. Big companies ran thousands of servers, and armies of administrators configured, patched and checked them one machine at a time. Mistakes caused outages and failed audits. Dev Ittycheria and Vijay Manwani founded BladeLogic to do that work with software. By its 2007 offering, banks and telecom carriers used it to run some of the largest data centers in the world.

Two Founders, Two VC Firms

Ittycheria had been at Bessemer Venture Partners and Manwani at Battery Ventures before they started BladeLogic in Lexington, Massachusetts. Their product handled the full life of a server: provisioning it, rolling out changes, enforcing settings and proving compliance to auditors. It worked across Windows, Linux and Unix machines from one console. The timing helped. New rules like Sarbanes-Oxley forced companies to prove who changed what, and BladeLogic kept the record.

Seventeen Dollars, Then BMC

BladeLogic priced its offering at $17 a share in July 2007 and listed on Nasdaq under BLOG. It was one of the last enterprise software offerings before the financial crisis. Less than a year later, BMC Software agreed to buy the company for $28 a share in cash, about $800 million, and closed the deal in April 2008. Ittycheria later became chief executive of MongoDB.

Cover: The Swordsmith Munechika and the God of Inari, Katsushika Hokusai. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a swordsmith forging a blade.